This email was circulated at Berkeley earlier this week, according to an acquaintance of mine:

 “Dear Students, Faculty and Staff,

This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear; public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections.

But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint—that we’re required to allow it—but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.

Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right. It is who we are.

Nonetheless, defending the right of free speech for those whose ideas we find offensive is not easy. It often conflicts with the values we hold as a community—tolerance, inclusion, reason and diversity. Some constitutionally-protected speech attacks the very identity of particular groups of individuals in ways that are deeply hurtful. However, the right response is not the heckler’s veto, or what some call platform denial. Call toxic speech out for what it is, don’t shout it down, for in shouting it down, you collude in the narrative that universities are not open to all speech. Respond to hate speech with more speech.

We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space. These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.

This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley. The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal. If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.

We will have many opportunities this year to come together as a Berkeley community over the issue of free speech; it will be a free speech year. We have already planned a student panel, a faculty panel and several book talks. Bridge USA and the Center for New Media will hold a day-long conference on October 5; PEN, the international writers’ organization, will hold a free speech convening in Berkeley on October 23. We are planning a series in which people with sharply divergent points of view will meet for a moderated discussion. Free speech is our legacy, and we have the power once more to shape this narrative.

Sincerely,

Carol Christ

Chancellor”

The builders of the Dakota Access Pipeline are suing the racket of “environmental” groups that spent half a year obstructing their work:

From last summer through the first couple of months of 2017 there was an all-out assault on the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Protesters, summoned to rural south central North Dakota by the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a myriad of environmental groups, blocked roads and set fires and harassed pipeline workers all in an attempt derail the project.

It didn’t work. Oil flows through the Dakota Access Pipeline today, but the State of North Dakota did run up a $38 million bill for the law enforcement response.

Anyway, today Energy Transfer Partners (the company behind DAPL) filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing some of the environmental groups involved in the protests of racketeering.

For all the fawning coverage MInnesota Public Radio gave the protests and protesters, I’m almost amazed they weren’t named as co-respondents.

So many statues out there – ergo, so much triggering.

As Big Left prowls the country looking for history that “triggers” them and must be destroyed [1], it’s probably worth pitching in and helping findi more history that needs to be expunged.

Exhuming McCarthy:  much has been made of the statue of Lenin in, where else, Seattle:

Leftover “art” from some misbegotten WPA project from hell?

No – a labor of “love” in the full Orwellian sense of the term;  from Wikipedia:

Lewis E. Carpenter, an English teacher in Poprad originally from Issaquah, Washington, found the monumental statue lying in a scrapyard ready to be sold for the price of the bronze; Carpenter had met and befriended Venkov while in Czechoslovakia. In close collaboration with a local journalist and good friend, Tomáš Fülöpp, Carpenter approached the city officials with a claim that despite its current unpopularity, the sculpture was still a work of art worth preserving, and he offered to buy it for $13,000.^[1] After many bureaucratic hurdles, he finally signed a contract with the mayor on March 16, 1993.^[4]

With the help of Venkov, the statue was cut into three pieces and shipped to the United States at a total cost of $40,000.^[1] Carpenter financed much of that via mortgaging his home

The architect of a kleptocratic thugocracy that murdered tens of millions of people over seventy years?  I’m #triggered!  Break out the tow cables and the blowtorches!

But we’re not done expunging Communism’s murderous legacy.   The Minnesota State Capitol is crowded with paintings and sculptures of people who were figures in the “Farmer Labor” Party, and the early years of the merger between them and the Democrats to form the “DFL”.

The Farmer-Labor, as well as the DFL it joined, was expressly pro-communist.  The new party inherited the FLP’s support for the USSR and Josef Stalin.   The infant DFL, in other words, supported the party of the Holodomor, of the Gulag, of the Purge.

It’s time to rid our state of this noxious legacy of genocide.  I suggest a painting-burning and smashing.

Politically Incorrect:   Next, it’s time to address statues and other public art that pays omage to a  Christianist preacher who was a very powerful spokesperson against gay marriage – one whose influence among opponents to gay marriage today is too huge to calculate; one who, were he alive today, would be railing against same sex marriage with a fluency and authenticity today’s speakers can only dream about.

That anti-gay bigot?

Martin Luther King!

His failure to support gay marriage – presaging the mass dissent from most black Christian ministers, even today-

Can this be allowed?

(more…)

At Berkeley, police stood down as the Blackshirts attacked conservative events – twice.

At Middlebury College in Vermont, police stood idly by as “Anti”-fascists attacked a conservative speaker and one of their own professors.

And in Charlottesville last weekend, the police were given a “Stand Down” order, (by a mayor who condemned the permitted protesters, but pointedly refused to address the Blackshirts) allowing the Blackshirts to attack a “white supremacist” rallly with impunity

Nope – nobody dare suggest that Big Left is all about getting and holding power.  Perish the thought.

James Damore is exploring his legal options against Google.

And apparently he has some:

According to Dan Eaton, an attorney and ethics professor at San Diego University, the engineer certainly has grounds for a case on two fronts. “First, federal labor law bars even non-union employers like Google from punishing an employee for communicating with fellow employees about improving working conditions,” Eaton writes.

And second, because the memo was a statement of political views, Eaton says Google may have violated California law which “prohibits employers from threatening to fire employees to get them to adopt or refrain from adopting a particular political course of action.”

An international corporation with armies of both lawyers, Google knew all this. They decided to take their chances with state and federal law anyway rather than stick up for one of their employees and risk public backlash. That’s an incredibly telling decision from a company that has mastered everything from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars.

Question:  Will a Goodle “self-driving car” actually drive someone who opposes Planned Parenthood?

But I digress.  If Mr. Damore has a legal plaintiff’s fund, I’ll be contributing.

By the way –

The “far” left has revived the tradition of blackshirts (literally) beating up their opponents.

Could this have been far behind?

The designs, created by KA Designs and sold on the site, all display large swastikas in the front.

One shows the Nazi-associated symbol in rainbow colors with the word “Peace”, another one with the word “Zen”, one reading “Love” and a third design, in black, shows a spiral of swastikas. They range in price from $20 to $35.

I fully expect to see Oberlin graduates building camps where they will teach people to concentrate on social justice.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This article says America is great because we had high school for everybody, which gave us the educated workforce required to succeed during the growth of businesses as banking, retail and manufacturing.

Wait, what?  Everybody had to go to high school so they could work as bankers and shop clerks?  Those activities have been around for millennia.  Christ drove the money-lenders from the temple.  His Dad, Joseph, was in manufacturing.  His Disciples bought bread and wine for the Last Supper from retail merchants.  None of them had a high school degree. What does Algebra II have to do with working in business?

The article points out that eventually, employers required new employees to have high school diplomas.  Yes, but was that because typewriters were so complex to operate that only the fully educated could manipulate them?  Or was it because there were so many high school graduates available, the employer might as well demand a diploma?  My son is a Senior Financial Analyst but can’t even apply for a promotion until he completes his MBA – not because the job duties require secret training only available in the MBA program, but because there are so many credentialed applicants available, the company can get away with demanding one.

Did demand for diplomas drive high schools to supply them, or did an excess of applicants supplied with diplomas drive demand for them?

It’s a critical question when we consider that Bernie and Hillary both demanded free college degrees, using the same tired justification.  Has it ever been true?

If a mediocre high school student dropped out of high school at age 14 to apprentice himself to an electrician, how would his economic prospects compare at age 24 to those of a mediocre student with a Liberal Arts degree?

Joe Doakes

At this rate, you’ll need a PhD in “retail kinesology” to run a checkout at Cub Foods.

LIBERAL:  “Why do you conservatives argue about ‘slippery slopes’ so much?”

CONSERVATIVE:  “Because some issues are, indeed, slippery slopes:

Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are “morally irrelevant” and ending their lives is no different to abortion, a group of medical ethicists linked to Oxford University has argued

The article, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, says newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life”. The academics also argue that parents should be able to have their baby killed if it turns out to be disabled when it is born.

If you’re starting to wonder if every American life spent saving Europe from totalitarianism was wasted, I really don’t have the energy to argue the point.

“Protect” Minnesota is having a “conference”, and they’re soliciting speakers:

Well – certain speakers:

The Northstar Conference Planning Committee is seeking proposals for presentations of 20, 30 or 60 minutes by individuals with appropriate academic credentials and/or recognized professional expertise related to the study or field of gun violence prevention that:

1. Present data-driven and evidence-based research or information about gun violence and its prevention.

2. Relate to one or more of three general subject blocks:
• health care, mental health, suicide prevention
• domestic violence, criminal justice, policy and legislation
• socioeconomic factors, disparities, urban gun violence

3. Have clearly-defined educational objectives that align with continuing education goals for public health, health care, mental health, law enforcement, or other professionals.

4. Are culturally sensitive and take into account the diverse backgrounds and outlooks of those in attendance.

The Planning Committee is particularly seeking presentations that address the following topics:
• racial and ethnic disparities
• adverse childhood experiences
• suicide risk factors and prevention among veterans, seniors, youth, and the LGBT community
• domestic violence risk assessment and prevention
• opioid addiction and gun violence
• the effects of mass incarceration on gun violence
• gun violence in the media
• successful community policing strategies
• effective legislation, public policy, and legal practices

Huh-wha?

Fortunately, a friend of the blog took the time to translate that description into clear, culturally-oppressive English:

Let me summarize that job description:

1. must hate guns with the passion of 1000 suns. Have plan to strip them from law abiding citizens.

2. Find ridiculous way to link gun control to something legit, such as health care and make it appear as yin and yang.

3. Experience with organize protesters and resistance parties in different peoples parents basements.

4. Make sure white people with guns are the enemy as often as possible.

Disregard minority on minority gun violence in its entirety.

Remember – “Protect” Minnesota has never, not once, made a single substantial, original, true statement.  This “conference” looks like it’ll push that to new levels.

Further evidence of the statement “”Protect” Minnesota has never – not once – made a statement that was simultaneously substantial, original and true” came to us yesterday in the form of a press release from their “Research Director”, the onimatopaiec Richard Gigler.

Gigler is reading the same numbers I related to you a couple weeks ago, showing that crime has dropped sharply across Minnesota in the last year.

But the takeaway from any given type of evidence depends on a lot of things; in this case, whether one is inept at statistics, or one represents a group that pathologically lies about gun owners and knows their audience isn’t smart enough to know they’re being lied to.

In this case, as “evidence” that “more guns don’t mean more safety”, Gigler notes that the percentage of homicides committed by guns “…rose by 1%”   Of course, they didn’t; they rose by two thirds of a percent, and even that is a statistical anomaly caused by the drop in overall homicides, not a hike in gun homicides (which, as we noted, dropped 23% in the past year!).

But the lie-via-incompetence is worse than that – because the number of homicides dropped, and the percentage of homicides involving a gun “rose” as a fluke of statistical background noise…

…as the number of guns in law-abiding civilians hands rose sharply, and the number of carry permittees hit record numbers.

Meaning that the percentage of guns used in crimes dropped.

Again.

Why do you suppose it is that “Protect” Minnesota can’t tell the truth?

I beg of you (where “you” = Big Left):

According to a Facebook event created by the Women’s March, the protest against the NRA will take place on Friday, July 14 and Saturday, July 15 in Fairfax, Virginia. The rally will begin on July 14 at 10:00 AM in front of the NRA headquarters in Fairfax. At noon, the 18-mile march from the NRA headquarters to the Department of Justice in DC will begin. The rally at the Department of Justice will begin at 10:00 AM on July 15.

Wear lots of pink hats, and dress as vaginas.  Please, please please please.

“Occupy Symbolic Meaningless New York Red Carpet” appears to be progressing apace.

And get all the lavish media overcoverage you can get.  I beg of you.

The ad is a “response” to an NRA ad that the proverbial “some” found provocataive:

Mallory explained to HuffPost why the NRA ad featuring [conservative pundit and NRA affiliate Dana] Loesch was particularly problematic and dangerous.

“This particular NRA ad, in our judgement, is very dangerous,” Mallory said. “It is specifically calling for members of the NRA and other gun owners to take up arms to address protesters or to push back against protesters, particularly people of color and people who support as us protesters and as black and brown people.”

Mallory is a hysterical ninny.

And the hypocrisy stews and fumes over the left’s response to the NRA like the humidity in New Orleans.  This is the left that’s been wrapping itself in “Resistance” romance – styling itself after the French, Poles, Norwegians, Danes, Yugoslavs and others who risked their and their families lives to kill Germans and collaborators, with guns, knives, bombs, garrotes.    A movement whose violent rhetoric is expressed through phrases like “Punch a Nazi” (where “Nazi” = anyone to the right of John McCain) and “Bash the Fash” and, in one episode (so far), a committed Democrat attempting mass murder on Republican congressmen.

So yeah, shrill harpies.  Hold your march.  Go big.  I beg of you.

To:  Minnesota Public Radio News
From:  Mitch Berg, irascible peasant
Re:  Your Teaser This Morning

Heard on MPR’s morning edition:  Cathy Wurzer blurbs to tease an upcoming story:  “Will an Embridge pipeline in Northern Minnesota become the next Standing Rock?”

Given MPR’s connections to the Twin Cities’ Big Environmentalist Left, you’ll pardon me if it sounds like:

1. Big Environmentalism and Big Protest have been planning to make this pipeline “the next Standing Rock” for some time.
2. MPR, being tied into the same Twin Cities “progressive” non-profit circles as Big Environment and Big Protest, knows this fully well.
3. Standing Rock was good business for MPR.  Their reporters had constant access to the Standing Rock site, and responded with what sounded to this listener like an awful lot of sympathetic puff-piece coverage.   MPR News and APM would no doubt love to have another story like it to fill this long slow, election-free summer.

Of course it’s going to be “like Standing Rock”.  And I’m pretty sure everyone that matters at MPR already knows it, is planning for it, and started booking hotel rooms up amid the jackpines long before Wurzer’s teaser was written.

I mean, am I wrong?

That is all.

My Theory:  Donald Trump’s arrogant blowhardiness is almost entirely intended to send the Big Left – the Dems and the Media (PTR) – chasing after squirrels, obsessing over diplomatic niceties, and wasting their own time while he and his uneasy GOP alliance get things done.

Evidence toward that theory submitted for your approval.

Q: How can you tell a gun grabber is lying?

A: They are attempting to communicate via any way, shape or form.  Verbally or non-verbally.  In any language.

John Lott on how the media – knowingly or not – inflates the gun grabbers’ numbers.  And as national carry permit reciprocity gains speed in Congress, it’s going to get worse.

And it touches on something readers of this blog knew almost a decade ago; the pro-criominal-safety lobby’s pet “think” tank is a room full of lying sacks:

The Violence Policy Center (VPC), the source of these claims, asserts that in the 10 years from May 2007 to April 2017, U.S. concealed handgun permit holders were responsible for 969 nonself-defense gun deaths (with any type of weapon, not just handguns).

We’ve dealt with the VPC and their “statistics” on this blog before, and found them to be pure garbage.  Nohitng’s changed since then:

Looking at the VPC numbers for 2016, they claim that 26 permit holders supposedly committed 29 homicides. With over 15 million permit holders nationwide last year, those deaths amount to 0.2 homicides per 100,000 permit holders.

However, there is an arrest and investigation virtually anytime a permit holder uses a handgun in a public place. Almost all of the 2016 cases are listed as pending, and most of the defendants will be acquitted on account of self-defense.

So as I noted in my 2009 piece on the swine at the VPC, they treated all ambiguous cases as cut and dried murder.  And it gets worse:

The tally of 969 deaths is the result of triple and even quadruple counting. Michigan — by far the worst state according to VPC numbers — supposedly suffered 78 homicides and 390 suicides. Supposedly, Michigan was the site of over 40 percent of all deaths attributed to permit holders.

The main problem is that pending cases are counted in the same way as convictions. The Michigan State Police report the number of pending cases and convictions each year.

But since most cases never result in a conviction and many cases can be listed as pending for two or three calendar years, this results in massive over counting.

An additional 30 cases are added in, as a result of news stories. Apparently, no effort was made to check if these cases were already accounted for in the state police reports.

A case that ends in acquittal will, therefore, be counted four times if it is covered in a news story and is pending for three years. Over the past 10 years, 17 Michigan permit holders were convicted of homicide, not 78.

That comes to 1.7 cases per year, out of 560,000 permit holders in June 2016.

Which gives permittees a homicide rate about one quarter that of the state of Minnesota, and about 1/120th the rate for Michiganders as a whole.

That’s over two orders of magnitude safer than the general public.

And yet what do  you suppose the media reports, with airtight incuriosity?

The VPC’s only “violence policy” is their policy of genocide toward the truth.

Did Trump do anything wrong?  We don’t know – that’s what trials (and the whole “innocent until proven guilty”) thing is all about.

But the firestorm of agitation that Big Left and the Media are whipping up, in the absence of any hard evidence, has nothing to do with right, wrong or justice, says Kurt Schlichter:

The blizzard of lies and distraction blowing through Washington is not just any routine stuffstorm, but a calculated attempt to bring down a president – our president, not the establishment’s president. And more than that, it’s an attempt to ensure that we never again have the ability to disrupt the bipartisan D.C. cabal’s permanent supremacy by inserting a chief executive who refuses to kiss their collective Reid.

This is a coup against us. It’s a coordinated campaign by liberals and their allies in the bureaucracy and media to once and for all ensure their perpetual rule over us. We need to fight it, here and now, so we don’t have to fight it down at the bottom of this slippery slope.

There are times I wonder if this nation shouldn’t just call it quits and split into 2-5 other nations, and let the coasts rot in their own splendid filth.

It’s 2009.

Barack Obama is president – elected in part by a biblical wave of support from black voters and novelty in the general election, and identity-mongering in the primaries.

You’re a Democrat strategist, planning ahead to the next two elections.  You need to keep women – Hillary Clinton voters – engaged enough to vote for Obama again in four years.  Child’s play; engineered a fake “war on women” and assign the media to run it.  Which they will.  They always do what you tell them.  It doesn’t always work – NPR was trying to make “Occupy” a thing for a solid year after the last rat-infested rape camp was carted to the landfill – but often enough, it gets the ignorant riled up enough to move the dial.

But look ahead four more years.  Obama will be termed out.  The Democrat bench is painfully shallow; the buffoon Biden, Fauxcahontas, the photogenic failure Martin O’Malley, and a few other governors that (you can’t possibly know or believe, yet) will be turned out of office next year…and the donkey in the room, the inevitable Hillary Clinton.

Who you gonna call?

Of course Hillary’s the front-runner.  She’s been painstakingly grooming herself and building a machine since 1998; but for the tsunami of identity that carried the freshman Senator Obama into office, she’d likely have already been president already.

But – but, you think she’s going to be like 200 years old in 2016.

So how do you get a tsunami of African-Americans to turn out in the same kind of numbers for a geriatric honky?

Create a race relations crisis, and send the order down the chain of command to the mainstream media to create a national issue of it.  Then, exploit it with a presidential campaign that was about virtually nothing but identity politics.

Well, as re the crisis, it’s mission accomplished:

Unfortunately (for Hillary), the relentless identity-mongering backfired, turning blue-collar honkies into an identity group in its own right.

And so today we have Hillary still out of office, a lingering race relations crisis that’s killing hundreds of people a year in our inner cities…

…and a media awaiting orders for the next national politically-based squirrel chase.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Star Tribune newspaper (using the term very generously) with their stable of leftist propagandists, is so far out of the reality loop that I am becoming convinced they are not merely pretending to believe this swill, they actually believe it.  I know this is a long and ludicrous review, but it’s informative to see just how outrageous things have gotten.

It’s utterly ridiculous.  The proposal to stop forcing taxpayers to pay for murdering babies in the womb is literally the same thing as enslaving women and assigning them to castes for breeding.  And that future is NOW!!!

The show, in the works before Trump’s election, “became more relevant than we ever imagined,” said Warren Littlefield, the executive producer, earlier this year. “A big part of what we deal with in ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ is the issue of women’s control of their body, and now we’re dealing with the possible defunding of Planned Parenthood . . . We didn’t want to be more relevant, but somehow we got that way.”

The inability to distinguish fantasy from reality is a symptom of mental illness.  Someone should intervene to help this woman.

Joe Doakes

You have to walk a long way from Hollywood to find someone capable of intervening.

As we noted earlier this morning, the mayor of Seattle is expanding his “soda tax” to cover diet pop¹ because apparently minorities drink more sugar-sweetened pop than honkey does.

And the tax – which was ostensibly about taxing people into health – became a matter of crushing white privilege.

As commenter Mammathus Primigenius noted in the comment section, the idea that upper middle class honkeys drink diet pop is sooooo 1986.

If the Mayor of Seattle (and let’s be honest, Minneapolis will want to keep up with the social justice joneses; it’s the city’s one productive industry) wants to stick it to honkey, I think we need to create a list of things that are genuinely associated with his and Betsy Hodges’ main voting bloc  upper-middle-class urban “white privilege”.

I’ll start things out.  You feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.  I’ll send them to the Mayor when we’re done:

• Kombucha
• Coconut Oil
• Raw Denim
• Beard-care products
• Any coffee or tea beverage that includes more than coffee or tea
• Riding bicycle paths
• Skateboarding
• Art crawls
• Skiing and snowboarding
• Yoga classes and accessories
• Four year private colleges
• Membership fees in “gun safety”, environmental and animal rights groups and the ACLU.
• Subarus
• Whole Foods goods of any and all types
• Doulas
• Anything purchased from Etsy

Carry on!

As the American left continues to indulge its long-suppressed penchant for violence, this editorial from National Review will only continue to get more relevant:

For those at Berkeley celebrating what they believe to be a moral victory, consider this: As much as you may detest Ann Coulter, she has never used violence or the threat of violence to keep someone from speaking. She is a better citizen than you are, with a deeper commitment to genuinely liberal and humane values. You may call yourselves the anti-fascists, but your black-shirt routine — along with your glorification of political violence and your rejection of liberal and democratic norms — suggest that the “anti” part of that formulation is not entirely appropriate. Perhaps you are only young and ignorant, but if you had any power of introspection at all, you would see that you are the thing you believe yourselves to be fighting. You are the oppressors, the censors, the violent, the hateful, the narrow-minded, the reactionary.

All true.

Unfortunately, the left is becoming an entire community of clinical narcissists; they live by gaslighting those around them, and have trained themselves to shunt all their crimes off onto others.

A friend of this blog writes…:

“We’re for wealth sharing and against white supremacy – But only on our terms. Followed this link from Minnpost.

How many tales of woe started with those five words?

But I digress:

 The biggest 2 complaints from this blogger seems to be that wealthy people are sharing their wealth to help the less wealthy and that parents of color are choosing to ignore what white elected people think is best for their families. I see nothing wrong with that. And I thought getting the wealthy to share their wealth and to have people of color reject white supremacy were liberal goals. So, every one should agree, right?

I checked out the link – and as I live and breathe, it’s our old friend Ed Levine.   Apparently he’s got some anti-charter school group – I’d guess some teachers’ union spinoff – to fund him, and I’d guess fund him pretty well; that’s a pretty slick website.

Since my kids finished high school, I have to confess – I’ve been a little lax in my coverage of the war on charter schools – but the DFL push to torpedo the lifeboats and push those kids and their families back onto the Titanic continues apac

Anyway, Ed – I know, right?  The nerve of those inner-city parents.  Who are they going to believe – the Teachers Union, or their own lying eyes?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Grocery checkout clerk:  I’m sorry, sir, your sale has been declined.
Liberal:  What?  My card is declined? Fine, I’ll pay cash.
Clerk:  No sir, the card is fine.  But the manufacturer won’t allow us to sell certain items to you.  I’ll have to remove them from the conveyor and you can buy the remaining items.
Liberal:  That’s ridiculous.  How can the manufacturer refuse to sell to me?  I demand to see a manager.
Manager:  Sorry sir, you’re the latest in a long line of customers who are having this problem.  You see, the manufacturer is engaging in a reverse boycott against certain people.  We’re prohibited from selling their products to the people being boycotted.
Liberal:  They can’t do that! They can’t refuse to do business with me.  I have rights!
Manager: Actually, they can.  The law says they can’t refuse to do business with people for discriminatory reasons like not baking a cake for gays, but they can refuse to do business with Liberals the same way the Liberals are boycotting Trump hotels.   Discrimination against people in the opposite political party is perfectly legal and since Liberals started the trend, it’s catching on everywhere.  They probably got your name from a mailing list of Democrat contributors or MPR members.
Liberal:   But I didn’t donate to any of those things.
Manager:  No?  Maybe you signed an on-line petition?  Or maybe one of your family members or Facebook friends did so you’ve been flagged because of that?  It could be a secondary boycott, same as when Liberals refuse to buy from Ivanka’s business because of her Dad’s politics.
Liberal:  This is bull.  I demand you sell me my items.
Manager:  I can sell you everything that’s not on the boycott list.  Let’s see, you can have, well, actually, sir, I’m afraid everything on this conveyor is on one list or another.
Liberal:  How is that possible?  How many boycotts are there?
Manager:  Only a few, but companies like Nestle own many brands and those are the brands you’ve chosen, like, for instance, Coffee Mate, Kit-Kat, Perrier, Honey Nut Cheerios, Friskies cat food.  You’ve also got Land O Lakes milk and butter, those are on another list.  Oh, here, you can have the Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, they aren’t boycotting people like you.
Liberal:  People like me!!  Fine, if that’s the way you feel, I’ll take my business elsewhere.
Half an hour later . . .
Whole Foods Clerk:  I’m sorry, sir, your sale has been declined.
Joe Doakes

There are companies I’d be happy to have boycott me.

Very, very publicly.

Not long after the inauguration, when Big Feminism threw their nationwide “Women’s March” in media centers around the country, I heard the usual suspects hyperventilating about all the “strong, fearless, powerful women” who were converging for the marches.

Of course, I saw episodes like t his…

…and observed that it’s always the “feminists” – male and female – who jabber the hardest about how strong, fearless, powerful and “fierce” they are that are the first do dive into ofay ad hominem babble (“your male privilege…”, “mansplaining”) if you dare dissent from their current gospel in any way.

(I was also tempted to find some of those precious little snowflakes and ask them if they though they could last twenty minutes in my grandmother’s shoes; she, who raised my dad by herself while running a photography studio, in a small town, during WW2?  I think not).

David French on feminism’s new shiny toy, the “Fierce Girl”:

We are living in the age of the fierce girl. That’s the new feminist ideal. Do you want to make online feminists furious? Just try writing a television or movie script that even implies that “damsels in distress” need any man to rescue them from danger. No indeed. The modern female action star can take down any number of burly men. Doubt me? Watch Charlize Theron destroy man after man in this trailer for Atomic Blonde.

It’s modern feminism, telling modern women what they must do and be with their newfound “choice”.

Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, banned and confiscated all civilian firearms.

And now, as the Maduro regime’s support frays under the complete collapse of the Venezuelan economy, he’s re-arming…

…well, the right Venezuelans:

“A gun for every militiaman!” Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro said to uniformed militia members outside the presidential palace, Fox News reported on Tuesday. The Bolivarian militias, created by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, already number in the hundreds of thousands and are being used to supplement the regime’s armed forces. Maduro is boosting the number of armed supporters in hopes of keeping control over the country from what he labels “imperialist aggression.”

Yet again – the necessary precursor to dictatorship was the disarming of the law-abiding.

Just a further lesson – there can be no compromise with the tyrants – be they Nicolas Maduro or Michael Bloomberg or Nancy Nord Bence.

Ever.

To:  The Entire Twin Cities News Media
From:  Mitch Berg, ornery peasant
Re:  The Reverend Nancy Nord Bence

Back during my brief and unlamented reporting career, I had not a few editors and producers warn me off using certain sources – the ones that had a habit of feeding them bum information.

I’m going to do the same for you today.  To wit:

On the subject of guns, the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence – the director of “Protect” Minnesota – has never made a single, substantial, original, true statement. 

Not One..

Every word in there is a key qualifier.  I don’t doubt that she makes true, substantial, original statements about other things – Lutheran theology (I’ll let you Missouri Synod people mix it up on that), her family, sports trivia, whatever.   Those are not at issue.

But on the issue of guns, gun laws, gun owners, violence statistics, then the Reverend Nord Bence and her organization have never – not once – made a single statement that is simultaneously substantial, original, and true.

She/they may have made statements that are substantial and true – like, repeating broad statistics from the Department of Justice website (before they embroider them, anyway) – but the statements aren’t original.

They may have said things that are substantial and original – like “Stand your Ground is a threat to minorities and immigrants” – but it’s not true.   It’s devoid of fact.

The Reverend may have said things that true and original – like “Ron Latz supports our agenda” – but they were not substantial contributions to the debate; they were, as lawyers say, de minimis.  

And of course, as we’ve shown in several long series of threads on the Reverend, her predecessor in the office, and their “organization”, they have a long history of saying things that are substantial but unoriginal and false; of things that are original but insubstantial and false, and of course things that are true but insubstantial and unoriginal.  That goes without saying.

But the overriding realization is that the Reverend, and her precessessor Heather Martens, and their entire organization have yet to say a single thing on Second Amendment issues hat is simultaneously all three things – original, substantial and true.

And I’ll welcome the chance to prove it to any or all of you, point by point, with or without the Reverend there to speak on her behalf. The challenge is rhetorical – she openly tells her group never to engage with dissenters, and all too many of you in the media indulge her inability to defend her largely fraudulent agenda.

But this isn’t about her.  This is about you.  You need to stop treating the Reverend and her group as a legitimate source on Second Amendment issues.

She is not.   She feeds you false information, and you – God bless you all, journos tend not to know much about the subject – run it without any serious fact-checking.

More tomorrow.